Oracle Corp. and Akamai Technologies, Inc. announced development and delivery of Edge Side Includes (ESI), an open specification for assembling dynamic Web pages at the edge of the data center or the edge of the Internet. Vendors in the application server and content delivery industry are expected to jointly submit ESI to the appropriate standards bodies for approval as a standard later this spring. ESI is a simple markup language used to define Web page fragments for dynamic assembly at the edge of the data center or the edge of the Internet. Traditional caching techniques speed the delivery of static content to client browsers over the Internet and corporate intranets. Most Web pages today, however, are generated on demand for each individual user and many contain a mix of personalized and non-personalized content fragments, making them non-cacheable by traditional caching products and CDN services. ESI will enable dynamic assembly of these page fragments. Akamai will implement ESI as part of the Akamai EdgeSuite service offering starting in May of 2001. This will include the integration of ESI into Akamai’s metadata management system, as well as the support for ESI across Akamai’s global platform of close to 10,000 globally distributed content delivery servers. Oracle9i Application Server with support for ESI is scheduled to be available next month. Oracle9i Application Server costs $5 per Universal Power Unit for the Standard Edition, $30 per Universal Power Unit for the Enterprise Edition and $150 per Universal Power Unit for the Wireless Edition. Oracle JDeveloper, part of Oracle Internet Developer Suite, will enable the development of ESI-compliant Java applications. Both products will be available for purchase through the Oracle Store. www.oracle.com, www.akamai.com